Dream Institute

The nervous system is somehow involved in so many diseases and disorders, from fleeting, no-account headaches to crippling paralyses, that doctors are often at a loss to know what part of the patient to treat first. Some forms of liver disease, for example, cause emotional disturbances that can be mistaken for mental illness or signs of brain damage. Merely to diagnose many cases in which the nervous system is involved takes an almost infinite variety of sensitive electronic devices. Treatment calls for gadgetry too, and research calls for still more.

Though all major U.S. medical centers have some facilities for treating disorders of the nervous system, until now only Columbia University and the University of Illinois have had neurological institutes where all the specialties have been unified under one roof. Last week, with the dedication of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, the U.S. got its third such organization. The building bulged with $400,000 worth of sophisticated electronic devices.

Deep in the Brain. With eight oscilloscopes attached to electroencephalographs, doctors at Barrow can see brain waves the moment they are generated. X-ray pictures of the brain's arteries can be taken from both front and side at half-second intervals. To locate a defective part of the brain that is causing epileptic seizures, electrodes must sometimes be delicately inserted deep into the brain itself, so the institute has an elaborate device for placing the electrodes with three-dimensional, pinpoint accuracy. For the most refined diagnosis in some patients, these electrodes will be used for stimulating parts of the brain.

Of all the institute's ultramodern equipment, Director John R. Green is proudest of the massive electron microscope. Magnifying 200,000 times, it can photograph bits of matter as small as a brain cell. "We can study changes in single cells in tumors and changes due to aging," says Dr. Green. "We see this machine as ten tons of hope."

Promise of Firsts. Because tradition holds that the best medicine and research grow around a medical school in a major university, and Arizona is one of the few states that have no medical school, Phoenix seemed an unlikely place to start a neurological institute. But to Neurosurgeon Green, 47, it seemed ridiculous to wait for one to burgeon and bloom like a century plant. He longed for a local institute to save patients from having to travel hundreds or thousands of miles.

Dr. Green discussed the idea with Julia Barrow, wife of Charles A. Barrow, a former machine-tool maker. She had an incurable brain tumor, and shortly before her death in 1959, she asked her husband: "Why don't you go ahead and give Dr. Green his institute?" Barrow came out of retirement, donated more than $1,000,000 of his own money and raised $2,000,000 more to found the Barrow Neurological Institute.

Even before its official opening, its 50 beds were filled with patients suffering from skull fractures, Parkinson's disease, tumors of the brain and spinal cord, and assorted other examples of the 200 human ills loosely classed as neurological. It had already undertaken its first operation, for a temporal-lobe defect causing epilepsy. The 13-member team in the operating room included an electronics engineer, a neurophysiologist, a neuroanesthesiologist, an electroencephalographer, and a behavioral psychologist.

"We're not the biggest in any sense, except perhaps in the youth of our staff, and we have no 'firsts' to talk about yet," says Dr. Green. "But we expect to have a number of firsts before too long." He well may. Britain's famed Neurologist Macdonald Critchley, accustomed to working on pinched budgets, helped to dedicate the Barrow equipment and said, with understandable envy: "This is a dream institute."

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